Re: Priority of valid documents

Invalid documents are a basic problem in terms of how a browser should deal
with them. They are a particular problem for authoring tools, since if a
document is invalid (according to whatever its grammar is) a tool can not
have any good way of dealing with it - either it retains the invalid markup,
which as Bruce has pointed out in conference calls is extremely difficult in
practice (unless it is a failure of that tool, which could more easily be
rectified by the tool producing markup valid to a scheme specified by the
tool...) or it throws out everything which is not valid, which may result in
a loss of accessibility becuase the tool is not aware of some wonderful new
piece of markup. As an example, consider the RUBY element being developed by
i18n [1], and how a tool shold deal with taking one part of it to place it
somewhere else.

If the tool produces a document which can be validated to a published grammar
(P2 requirement from WCAG, and therefore inherited already as a P2) then it
can be dealt with. If it doesn't, then it has to make an arbitrary decision
about how to deal with a piece of markup it doesn't understand. The grammar
need not be a W3C specification, but it must be available for tools to check
against. See 2.5.1 in the current draft [2]

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-ruby
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WAI-AUTOOLS-19990421

Charles McCN

On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, William Loughborough wrote:

  I guess the distinction is between documents that are "valid"
  (presumably meaning validatable according to some W3C validator) and
  those that are accessible.  If this is just about the former then P2
  seems OK because it's possible to have an accessible but invalid
  document and that's not a P1 level problem.
  -- 
  Love.
              ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
  http://dicomp.pair.com
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 13:26:00 UTC